Tutorials

The Estimation Clinic is designed to facilitate a change conversation equipping software leaders and practitioners with practical concepts and ideas regarding a change to their current estimation culture, process, and results. A variety of estimation and sizing methods are available, however, choosing the appropriate set depends on your level of estimation maturity and your estimation improvement end goal.

In this tutorial, you will review the current methods of estimation available followed by a self-assessment of Estimation Maturity for your organization. Without a financial business incentive, though, change is difficult if not impossible. And so, the session will also include a financial analysis of how much money can be saved and reinvested with better estimation results.

Understand a variety of estimation methods and how to choose the appropriate set.

As Test Leads make the transition to Test Manager, quickly assessing the maturity of an organization’s software testing is a critical skill. What is the scope of the assessment? What standard do you use to measure testing? Based on the findings of the assessment, what testing process improvements are going to give your team the biggest return on investment? These are just some of the key questions to answer when planning, conducting, and taking action on the results of a testing assessment. In this tutorial, you will learn about the assessment process and gain the skills to conduct your own mini test assessment.

Learn how to leverage the Test Maturity Model to conduct an assessment

Gain insight to an assessment process and practices

Use assessment findings to build and prioritize an improvement plan

Organizational Change

Quality Assurance and Organizational Change: What’s in it for me and them?

All too often we find ourselves caught in the “project squeeze,” the time between creation and production. This is the time when upstream delays have taken away precious time to provide for quality testing. What can we do? While quality assurance isn’t included early on in planning; we do have ideas that might help to create a quality product and process. Perhaps others don’t understand our discipline or value our input. Perhaps we don’t always understand the best way to communicate with others. Come to this highly participative tutorial and learn how to get your voice heard to influence others for positive change.

The Gartner Group has estimated that “Companies spend upwards of 30% of their annual IS budgets and 60% of their annual software development budget on software testing.” If testing can become more efficient by designing the minimum number of required tests with 100% functional coverage, then development ROI will substantially increase. Can risk based test management provide a solution to this problem? Since it isn’t cost effective to test exhaustively, testing must be proactively planned. The basis for that can be testing more thoroughly those areas that are projected to be riskier or to cause greater harm. This tutorial focuses on identifying and prioritizing risks, and developing the right test strategy designed to provide the optimal coverage. Clyneice will also cover using common bug catalogs and typical errors to identify potential failures as well as the tracking and reporting of defects based on the risk test strategy.

The expansion of mobile devices has created enormous opportunities for companies to leverage this movement to increase sales, market products, and collaborate remotely. With the explosion in usage, there are increasing needs to perform QA and testing on mobile websites and applications to minimize defect risks and reduce the turnaround time to production. However, this is a challenging task considering the number of devices, multiple OS platforms, and OS versions. To manage the sheer volume of variations, companies must determine how to best incorporate both manual and automation testing into their mobile initiatives. Join David to become familiar with the challenges of mobile testing and learn how to establish viable mobile testing strategies, both manual and automated.

Understand the challenges of testing mobile websites and applications

Learn the factors to consider when designing manual and automated testing strategies

Metrics are powerful tools but often situation dependent. Insightful metrics for a waterfall approach may not be productive in an agile scenario and vice versa. In this workshop, QA and testing experts Shaun Bradshaw and Bob Galen delve into the value and pitfalls of various metrics in alternate SDLC’s. They will explore project-level, software development, and software testing metrics thru the lens of traditional and agile methodologies discussing the differences and similarities, strengths and weaknesses, and what to track and not. The showdown? Bob and Shaun, while respecting each other’s experience, rarely utilize the same metrics. So, be prepared to learn and to be entertained as these two metrics titans go head-to-head.

Appreciate the value of metrics and how to utilize them in alternative development methodologies

Understand the differences and similarities between metrics for agile versus traditional waterfall methodologies

Be aware of potential metric pitfalls as well as what to track and what not to track

Most organizations carry waste in their processes and procedures. However, identifying this waste and purging it can be challenging to do. There are several proven tools and techniques used by the Six Sigma and Lean communities that are quick and effective and can be applied to any organization to eliminate this problem. In this half day tutorial, Megan will walk through typical examples of waste and how best practices taken from Lean Software techniques and Six Sigma can be applied to reduce both the associated cycle time and costs. You will then apply these techniques in several hands-on exercises. At the end of this tutorial, you will leave with proven methods to employ in your own organization and start eliminating the waste.

Learn to apply proven techniques to identify, prioritize, and drive out waste.

Understand how to track progress and report metrics on waste reduction.

Recognize key pitfalls to avoid when driving out waste.

Quality Focused Project Management

Increasing the Quality of the Product in a Project Focused Environment

According to the Project Management Institute, quality is one of the nine knowledge areas of project management. While quality is to be defined as a part of project scope, there is typically more emphasis on the product itself versus its quality. Creating a focus on quality may be difficult when driven more by time and cost than by quality. This tutorial will focus on this topic from two perspectives, that of the project manager and that of the quality manager. Each position is driven by governing organizations that, through their certifications, directly inform the requirements of the positions. However, translating these definitions in to the real world may be a challenge and it is only from the integration of these two perspectives that a constructive focus on quality can be attained. So, whether you are a project manager or quality manager, you are invited to participate in an exploration of increasing quality in a project focused environment.

Understand the project manger’s role and perspective

Understanding of the quality manager’s role and perspective

Learn to integrate the two roles to create an environment that focuses on quality

Session-based test management (SBTM) is a technique for managing exploratory testing. Two of the major criticisms of exploratory testing are that it’s hard to make progress visible, and it’s hard to know what kind of coverage you might have after exploratory testing has been completed. Session-based test management is one answer to those problems, since it provides a metric for measuring progress (sessions) and takes coverage into account. In this tutorial, Mike will lead you though a look at the basics of SBTM. With an emphasis on hands-on exercises, you will work through examples of the various work products required and you will simulate running projects using this methodology.

Develop a working knowledge of managing the exploratory testing process using SBTM

Gain experience building and using the various work products of SBTM

Learn tips for dealing with the challenges of managing the exploratory testing process

We have seen many changes over the years including testing methods and new technologies but regression testing is a constant. It has long had the challenges of being easily forgotten, poorly planned, or omitted due to time constraints. With ever-increasing demands and conflicts of time-to-market against quality, it is critical to find a way to incorporate some level of regression testing into the software development effort. Utilizing exercises designed to provide practical experience with the regression testing effort, you will come to understand how to define various strategies for planning regression testing in ways that can improve the results of your software design, development, and deployment effort.